Hi Mom. Fairly decent workshop, considering it was an inexpensive one. The drive home sucked. If I wanted to sit in traffic on the freeway for an hour at a time, I'd move to LA. At least the beach would be closer there.

Mornin' MOM. Sure is nice to you have you all to myself. All those slug-a-beds in time zones further west are still snoozing. Let's go sit on the patio with our tea and scones and watch the birds as the sun rises up through the trees.

It is going to be bee-u-tee-ful day. We started the week here with the temperatures in the teens and are going to finish it with the temps near 80. It would seem that things warmed up considerably once brother Rapaire left the building.

Gonna be a busy day. Gotta get the house clean then go see clients, then go shop for violas, then meet Dani, Bobert and P-Vine for supper!

Dang, Janie, you get all the fun!!! I went to a String Quartet concert at the Neurosciences Auditorium last night--it was really beautiful! THe Mandelring Quartet from Germany--three sibs and a buddy. Awesome.

Wow! MOM is mixing in a high-brow crowd now that the Legion Hall patrons are moping that their buddy Rap is out of town.

Lucky Janie, to see all of those mudcatters! Have you met before?

Me, I'm contemplating all of the elements to go in a birthday meal for a son who turns 17 today. I can manage to get fruit in, but if it is by request, chances are it wouldn't have veggies. I'll have to be sneaky--he likes fried rice, so I'll make some as a side dish and cram it full of stuff. ;)

A carrier pigeon came in from Legion Hall this morning and crapped on our door step. So we let him in and unfurled the note around his ankle. It said "to drunk ta see strate need help am stuck under large wench who is unconshus. send rapayre to distrack her plz am starving" and was signed by Galloping Jim "Skinner" Alderson, who is usually in charge of the Legion's remuda when they go on expeditions to the package store and who loads up their mule-trains coming back. UNfortunately, he did not include a phone number so I can't use my iPhone to help him out...hope he's okay.

Is that the customary way for a visitor to gain entry to houses in San Diego?

Oh my, what a lovely, warm day it was! P-Vine and Bobert are a perfectly matched pair and a good time was had by all at supper. They broght me a couple of rare azaleas that P-Vine had started - one from a cutting, and a native that she had started from a seed.

Maggie, regarding your question, Dani and I have been close friends for many years. It is she who introduced me to Mudcat. I know Bobert from the Getaway, where we always get in a little garden talk, and he has brought me several very nice plants in subsequent years. I had never had the pleasure of meeting his wife before. We started talking gardens and plants as soon as we laid eyes on each other. A kindred spirit and delightful company.

I had way too much vino last night and smoked a cigar and played for my friends. We saw a really interesting film about the power of song in preserving the spirit of Estonia during the many long hard years of Russian and German occupation, and the courage of those who steered the country back to independence when the USSR broke up. A brave, brave people who love to sing. Especially in very lartge groups. And it sounds wonderful.

Time is the tide in the cosmic sea stretching and shrinking the way we feel every moment of our lives. Time, like the sea, has a surface but it is really a volume of ever changing pressure. We call Space time a fabric but it is not a scenic backdrop for the multiverse, it is far deeper.

At the boundry of great spinning speed, great gravitational or magnatar events the small waves and ripples as well as exotic matter are carried by a great sunami of time accelerating changes as profoundly different as the breezy sea sprayed wind surfer skips waves and the deep dark enormous pressures at trenches 3 miles down where condensates formed long ago.

Time is more fluid than all the subtle past present and future tenses we have given it in every language that has ever existed.

What is an illusion is that time at certain levels may appear to change the laws of the universe.

Well, it's a tough illusion to crack, but the kind of time we see in normal events, sequential frames, unidirectional arrow, and all that, is fundamentally a conviction that a thing is what it was, and that it has "persisted" ftom "then" to now... Now, on the other hand, is seen (under this illusion) as a zero point on the front edge of time, a spot from which the past is unreachable and the future not yet extant. This belief in the sameness of a thing persisting is a very tricky belief to subscribe to and can cause all kinds of trouble.

I know it's convenient for filing events in a noncolliding manner, but that does not mean you should believe that your filing system IS reality.

The biggest liability of the belief in this hypnotic flow of time is that it undermines the connection with creative energy.

This supports my suspicion that Little Hawk is just a solipsistic mock-up created by Rapaire. Rapaire gets put in Cork and Little Hawk puts a cork in it. I am getting tired of that pun, but the evidence is indisputable.

Does anyone here "Twitter?" Do you have to get in via email or phone? Does this mean my phone is going to make text message noises all of the time if people find me? Or I'll get more tiny little emails? Geez. Is there a viewer, something like AIM? Yahoo Messenger?

What funny things these translation bots are! I have answered a query from France about a coat I'm selling on eBay. I set it up to go to North America only, because I don't know what the rules are for shipping fur out of the U.S. but I figure Canada is safe.

I answered (more or less, I didn't keep a copy.) The question was in broken English so I sent back (apprently) broken French.

I think your query is about shipping to France? My apology, but I set this up to only ship to North America. I don't think I can change the countries to ship to now. I decided to not try to sell this worldwide to avoid the problems of shipping a fur. I read a little French, and I used Bablefish to write this. Bablefish dot yahoo dot com

I just ran it backwards through Bablefish to see what that person might see when it gets there.

I think that you are enquis of l' forwarding in France? My excuses, but me established this to only embark in North America. I do not know s' it is possible to change nations of destination now. J' decided not to try to sell to me in the whole world to avoid the problems d' to embark a fur. J' read French, j' had l' practice the bablefish to write this. bablefish dowry yahoo dowry COM

Oh, well. You'd think Bablefish would at least switch French to francais. I didn't look before I cut, pasted, and sent.

Well, the problem is I used to make great hay by puncturing Little Hawks bloviations, and I can't do that with you guys...

I think he got mad because I wouldn't accept his rejection of Chinga and kept insisting she was Chongo's abandoned sister. It's not nice to go messing with another person's character or figments, ya know. I hate it when people mess with MY figments. I should be more considerate.

More importantly, is your house still there? What happened? Surely discussion modern American financial institutions, banking, courts, and facing your troublesome accusers is fine fare for a BS thread.

I went onto facebook laST night (first time in a long time) and okayed a bunch of "friend" requests - ditched a bunch of people I have no clue why they were "friending" me - and one I know why - but I really don't need to "friend" the estranged mother of a foster nephew.

But how ridiculous is it to have a system that e-mails you to say someone has sent you a message; but makes you log into the site to read the message AND gives you no way to respond to the notification!

Most of the boards/lists/forums I belong to you either do everything through the site, or the e-mails allow you to do everything through e-mail. MUCH more sensible.

It is interesting. The word "friend" once had a deeper meaning, a stronger bond, and a duty of some kind that was willingly accepted by those who used the word.

Today it means someone has clicked a box on a web page by clicking a plastic button, sending an ASCII code to an interface, modulated, hopped, re-routed, reassembled, demodulated processed at front and back ends, starting a CGI or Java script, causing switches deep in a server to rattle and spark, writing a string to a file on a disk somewhere in the cloud....and never a moment of thought, spirit, ethical connection, commitment, honor, or loyalty is involved.

At Facebook go into Settings -> Notifications, and look at all of those options for Facebook, Photos, Groups, Pages, etc. Under that top category of "Facebook" you canlook at all of those radio buttons and turn off a lot of notifications. There is a line at the bottom of the list that says "show more (6)" so don't miss those. This program is WAY TOO BUSY to be very helpful, it's more "social" than "networking."

The trouble with Mudcat is that we don't use our own names at the 'cat but most of us use our own names at Facebook. I'm clueless as to who some of them are most of the time.